PERMAP is a free, Windows-based (Win 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista), real-time interactive program for making perceptual maps (also called product maps, strategic maps, sociograms, sociometric maps, psychometric maps, stimulus-response maps, relationship maps, concept maps, etc.). Its fundamental purpose is to uncover any "hidden structure" that might be residing in a complex data set. PERMAP takes object-to-object proximity values (similarities, dissimilarities, correlations, distances, interactions, psychological distances, dependencies, confusabilities, preferences, joint or conditional probabilities, etc.), or up to 30 object attribute values, and uses multidimensional scaling (MDS) to make a map that shows the relationships between the objects. Succinctly, it makes classical metric and nonmetric MDS analyses in one, two, three, … or eight dimensions, for one-mode two-way or two-mode two-way data, with up to 1000 objects and with missing values allowed. In addition, it can make several new types of MDS analyses involving error bounds or boundary conditions and it can show the affect of degrading the similarity information.
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